1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to storage systems, and, more particularly, to automated management and configuration of virtualized storage system environments.
2. Description of Related Art
Storage virtualization technologies are able to encapsulate underlying physical storage system structures to be presented to users in a simplified format, and are able to offer huge logical storage pools to users. The use of storage virtualization is expected to help solve current issues in mass data storage, such as extreme growth in the amount of business data or heterogeneous device management. However, at the same time, configuring a virtualized environment itself causes another level of complexity, and storage administrators may be apprehensive of managing such an intelligent but complicated environment. Therefore, there is an existing demand for an automated solution to assist administrators in configuring a virtualized storage environment.
Under common methods, storage virtualization may be achieved by inserting a device called a “virtualizer” or a “virtualization device” between host computers and storage systems. The virtualizer is able to present a virtual volume to a user, while mapping the virtual volume to one or more actual logical volumes on one or more storage systems. A virtualizer could be another array-controller type device, such as a storage controller, that has a feature to connect external storage systems to its backend ports and that represents the virtual volume associated with the storage volumes in the external storage devices as if the volumes on the external storage are a single volume existing on the front end virtualizer device. Alternatively, an intelligent switch device may be used for the virtualizer, and may also be able to encapsulate the connected respective storage systems to represent a virtual volume to users.
By using virtualizers, a storage network is separated into two parts: a first part, such as a front end domain for the network that exists between the host computers and one or more virtualizers, which represent virtual volumes to be mapped to the hosts; and a second part that is a back end domain for the network that exists between the one or more virtualizers and the one or more storage systems.
The front end network typically appears similar to a non-virtualized storage network, in which hosts are connected to storage arrays via switches, etc. However, to present a virtual volume on the virtualizer to a host, while mapping the virtual volume to an actual logical volume on a separate external storage system, the administrator also has to realize and configure the back end network, i.e., the portion of the network that exists between the virtualizers and the storage systems. The back end network portion of the virtualized storage environment is typically the part that is difficult for the administrators to configure since it adds another level of complexity to the management of the virtualized storage environment.
Furthermore in certain applications virtualizers may be arranged in a cluster-type of configuration, which provides advantages such as enabling the balancing the workloads and design architecture for avoiding single point of failure. In this case, volume mapping operations between actual storage volumes on a storage system and virtual volumes on a virtualizer somewhere in the cluster also can cause more complicated management work for administrators.
Thus, while it is known to create virtualization storage systems, there is no provision in the prior art for automating management and configuration of these systems to provide assistance to administrators. Accordingly, there is a need to relieve administrators from the difficulty of configuring a back end domain of a storage network when building a virtualized storage environment. There is also a need to automate configuration of the virtual volume allocation, and mapping of the virtual volume to the actual logical storage volumes on the storage systems when plural virtualizers are used for workload balancing.
Related art includes US Pat. App. Pub. 20050289308 to Kano, US Pat. App. Pub. 20050193167 to Eguchi et al., and US Pat. App. Pub. 20030221077 to Ohno et al., the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.